226 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1919 
Out of the great multitude of miscellaneous supplies a few may 
be selected as especially significant. We shipped abroad 21,000 tons 
of steel barbed wire. ‘The Germans used in barbed wire a manganese 
steel which our first cutters could not sever. They had, therefore, 
to be redesigned. We used over 200,000 marching compasses and 
ordered 14 million trench knives with cast-bronze handles. Files 
were required by tens of millions, and more than 500,000,000 pieces 
of small hardware. A million currycombs, 1,200,000 axes, 76,000 
lariats, and nearly as many 5-foot steel measuring tapes were minor 
items of supply, as were a quarter million storage batteries for radio 
work and 74 million feet of moving-picture film. ‘The balloon pro- 
gram called for 20,000,000 yards of highly specialized cloth, which 
required the construction of thousands of looms and therefore in- 
creased the demand for steel. In four days of the final drive of 
our troops in the Argonne district, the photograph sections of the 
air service made and delivered 100,000 prints from negatives taken 
above the battle lines. Such service involved the problems of op- 
tical glass and all the details of photograph equipment. On Novem- 
ber 11, 1918, there were in France 282 American telephone exchanges, 
9,000 stations, about 15,000 telephone lines, and in all, 96,000 miles 
of newly constructed long distance telephone and telegraph lines. 
The Signal Corps requirements for outpost wire were rising to 68,000 
miles a month, and we were producing 40,000 miles. This was a 
twist of two strands, each composed of four bronze wires and three 
of hard carbon steel. They were stranded together, coated first with 
rubber, then with cotton yarn, and finally, with paraffin. 
The brief and necessarily meager reference which has been made 
to a few of the more important or spectacular items of military 
supply in the war just closed has had no other object than that of 
calling attention for the moment to the extraordinary range and 
volume of the demands made upon the resources and productive 
capacity of a country by military necessities. Our entry into war 
was not unlike the passage from one type of civilization to another. 
We had to accomplish in a few months a change as profound as that 
with which Japan was confronted in 1854 when Perry’s ships cast 
anchor in the Bay of Tokyo. This new civilization was wholly alien 
to the old in its social conditions and in its demands upon the prod- 
ucts of industry. It quickly taught us that troops can be organized 
and trained far more quickly than industry can be revolutionized to 
supply their needs. And, as the Assistant Secretary of War, Mr. 
Benedict Crowell, from whose report much of these data have been 
taken, says in his introduction thereto, “The experience of 1917 and 
1918 was a lesson in the time it takes to determine types, create de- 
signs, provide facilities, and establish manufacture.” 
